Is suicide an unforgivable sin? A bit of hope for those left behind.

I am feeling impressed tonight to share something very personal….which is kind of odd because what I feel I should share actually happened over a year ago. However, I just feel very strongly that I am being asked to share this and hope that maybe it will help someone somewhere who is dealing with the loss of a loved one due to suicide.

Now, first off, I want to say that coming from a conservative Christian family, I was always taught that suicide was a sin that would get you sent straight to hell. It was murder and since you would die from the action before you could repent of it, you were out of luck if you later regretted it. Personally, I always doubted this belief, but when my sister committed suicide almost two years ago, these thoughts did make me worry about what would happen to her. I hoped and prayed that God would have mercy on her since she had been in horrible physical, emotional and mental pain at the time of her overdosing, but I didn’t really know what she was thinking or feeling the night she took far too many pills and then went to bed never to wake up again. I still wonder if she really knew she would die from her actions or was just desperate to rid herself of the pain, but I don’t know for sure and probably never will.

Anyhow, the incident that really affected me and made me feel that she was ok happened about 6 months or so after her death. I had already dreamed of her many times, odd dreams of doing routine stuff like shopping together or fighting like when we were kids. None of my dreams of her were realistic or made sense in the waking world…until the night I went to sleep and had the following dream:

When the dream began, my sister and I met in a huge hall or maybe an entranceway to some building that I didn’t recognize. When we saw each other, it was like we could communicate telepathically. I knew she was dead. She knew she was dead. Both of us knew how she had died and what it had done to those she left behind. She apologized to me, the most heartfelt apology I have ever gotten. She explained how she never meant to hurt me or her other loved ones. She admitted that she made a huge mistake and regretted it.

At that point, I asked her what had happened to her. I will never forget her answer. She told me that God was so much more loving and forgiving than we could even imagine. That God forgave her and was giving her a chance to work it out and try to make things better. It shocked me to hear these things since my sister wasn’t a Christian or religious in the conventional sense. She had always had curiosity about God, but had pushed religion away due to the strict and overly judgemental religious upbringing we had as kids. She never explained exactly what God was having her do, but just that he was giving her the opportunity to make up for her mistakes in some way.

At that point, we hugged and it felt so good. It felt like her. It smelled like her. I had all the senses that I normally have while awake. After we hugged, she just kind of dissolved into light and was gone and the dream ended. In the morning, when I awoke, I can not even describe the kind of relief this experience gave me. It brought me closure and gave me the chance to say goodbye. To me, it will always be more than a dream, but I realize it is easy to be skeptical when you haven’t experienced something like this yourself. Anyhow, I just hope that maybe this simple but meaningful experience of mine may encourage or comfort others going through similar things. Please feel free to leave a message below if you have anything to say on this topic.